He nodded. He did understand. She was not, as she pointed out, the empty beauty that he had imagined her to be. There was much behind her face that he’d not been aware of before. She was, he realized, something he’d never considered her to be. Dangerous. That’s what she was. He did not know exactly how, could not imagine what power she wielded, and yet he now believed she was not a woman to be crossed.
As if answering this thought, Corinn said, “Hanish betrayed me in ways that I can never forgive. In ways I won’t forget. Not this time. Rialus, I hope you’ll be truer than he. I have a message for you to take to Calrach. I have an offer to make him. I’ve looked into getting off the island myself, but I can see no way to do it. I’m a prisoner here, Rialus. But with your help…If we succeed in pulling off what I have in mind, you’ll be a very lucky man. You’ll be rewarded after the war with everything you’ve ever felt you deserved. I, and my brother, will make sure you have it.”
CHAPTER
Thaddeus Clegg could not have been happier with the man Aliver Akaran had become. Perhaps nobody but the former chancellor recognized how much the prince resembled his father in his features and timbre of voice, in the intensity and intelligence of his brown eyes, and the upright carriage of his torso. He was very much like Leodan had been in his youth. But Aliver had taken all these traits and honed them to a greater level of sharpness. Leodan had dreamed of and cogitated on action, reform, justice, but never truly acted; Aliver now lived and breathed all of these things and strove to shape the world accordingly. Thaddeus had been concerned over Aliver’s initial reticence to fully take up his mantle of responsibility, but that seemed ancient history now. Since returning from his search for the Santoth, the prince had not faltered. When he asked to again wear the King’s Trust, Sangae did not hesitate to retrieve it for him. With it hanging from his side Aliver Akaran looked every bit a hero in the making.
Aliver’s first task-that of winning the Halaly to his cause-had not been an easy one. He refused to join them in a petty war to exterminate their neighbors. Instead, he convinced them to put provincial squabbles behind them. They shared a common enemy far worse than any threat one Talayan tribe posed another. Defeating Hanish Mein, he argued, would be the single greatest thing any of them could do to change their fortunes. He promised that when he was king he would remember every deed done for him and every deed done against him. He would reward them all in manifold ways. The Halaly, he had said, could be leaders among Talayans, or they could be the sole people left without a say in the coming world. They’d be laughed at by future generations who would look back with ridicule on a people so blind to the changes at hand, who had been rendered inconsequential because of it. It could not have been easy to look Oubadal in the face and say such things, but Aliver managed it.
The chancellor had first heard reports of all of this from others. When the prince returned from Halaly and began to march north, he witnessed it himself. Aliver held forth to the ever-increasing throng flocking to him. People gathered to hear him each afternoon, when he issued rambling discourses to whomever sought him out. He spoke with a prophet’s fervor and made greater and greater leaps of vision each day. He detailed beliefs and intentions that Thaddeus had not expected, had not planted in him, or imagined himself. Yet they were ideas of such nobility that he could not fault the young man in the slightest.
When Aliver said he would reward those who aided him, he did not mean to do so in the old ways: with riches, by bestowing power on one tribe instead of another, by elevating one upon the shoulders of another. He wanted to break the old way along its twisted spine and throw the pieces out. He asked tribes-whether in Talay or Candovia, Aushenia or Senival or anyplace else-to think of one another as members of extended families. They did not have to love one another unquestioningly or agree upon everything or give without the expectation of receiving. But he would have them sit down at council together and seek out ways that they could mutually gain from policies meant to benefit them all. Each of them could find prosperity themselves, and smile upon their neighbors’ boons as well. Why should it be any other way?
“Edifus was wrong,” Aliver said one afternoon, in words that played again and again in Thaddeus’s mind afterward. “Tinhadin was wrong. Too many generations following them accepted the same inequities. My father, Leodan Akaran, even he could not see how to break free from the tyranny of his own stature in the world. He knew it to be wrong. I felt this to be so; I knew it without knowing it; I fought not to see it because I knew nobody wished me to see it. But then came Hanish Mein. Then came the greater evil that burned through the land and left it charred and damaged in so many ways. I abhor Hanish Mein for the suffering he inflicted upon the world. I hate that even now I must ask for thousands to give their lives in fighting him. But for one thing I thank him. When Hanish Mein broke the chain of Akaran rule he set the stage for a shift in the fortunes of the world. Hanish himself is not the beginning of a new age. He is only the pause between two sentences. The earlier Akarans spoke the first sentence and it was a disappointment; I and those who come after me will speak the second sentence and it will be one of justice.”
Hanish Mein nothing but the pause between two sentences…Thaddeus had never imagined laying the situation out so boldly. Nor did Aliver stop there. He promised to do away with conscripted labor in the mines. He’d cancel the Quota and never trade for the mist again. He swore his ultimate responsibility would be to rule in a manner that benefited as many as possible. He did not accept the belief that the natural order of humanity was that of a few benefiting from the work and suffering of the masses. He loved his ancestors-let no one say otherwise. They were wrong to have structured the world like this, but they also made him possible. In his name-and in theirs-he would shape a better future.
Whatever hesitancy Aliver may have had as a youth had vanished. He had burned it away like baby fat from his lean body, and during the daylight hours he moved with unflagging vigor. Sometimes, at night, in close company, his face and body showed fatigue, worry. But that, Thaddeus thought, was to be expected.
By the time they reached the open plains that stretched all the way north to Bocoum many were calling Aliver more than just the Snow King. He was proclaimed a prophet of the Giver. Nobody, people said, had ever spoken such noble truths to so many ears. The Giver worked through him. With this war the Giver was testing the world for righteousness. Perhaps when they triumphed, the Giver would return to the world and walk among people again.
Aliver never made such proclamations himself, but the ideas caught like flames touching the dry Talayan grasslands. It flowed from person to person, village to village, into and out of different languages. It leaped mountain ranges and sailed across seas. The people were hungry for a message such as this one. They ate it with ravenous mouths and received it with clear eyes, especially as person after person shook off their mist dependence. Thaddeus sometimes woke in the night, fearing that events were rolling forward too rapidly, but there was no going back now.
The old man still counseled the emergent king, but increasingly he found himself carrying out Aliver’s wishes instead of the other way around. Thaddeus handled communications with the wider world through all the channels he could. He alerted the hushed resistance in every corner of the Known World that Aliver Akaran had announced himself. They need not be hushed any longer. He imagined the scenes being played out as the news spread. Quick guerrilla strikes against Meinish interests. Trade convoys attacked. Outposts torched. Miners rising in rebellion. Soldiers picked off by ones and twos. Aliver wanted life made hard for the Meins in every way possible and in every place possible. But these acts of resistance should be kept small, he said. He wanted to sow clear-headed discord in every distant corner, while at the same time building his army and pushing up from the heart of Talay. He would arrange it so that his force was such a massive wave, Hanish Mein would have no choice but to meet him in what promised to be as great a battle as anything fought in the first war.